Affiliation: Center for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University (ZMBH), Germany

Dr. Ioannis A. Papaioannou is a geneticist at the Center for Molecular Biology of Heidelberg University (ZMBH), in Germany. He studied Biology (BSc) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, in Greece (NKUA), and he earned his MSc degree in Microbial Biotechnology (NKUA) in 2010. He completed his PhD in Biology at the Department of Genetics and Biotechnology (Faculty of Biology, NKUA) in 2015, where his research focused on the genetics of the parasexual cycle and vegetative incompatibility mechanisms in plant-pathogenic fungi. Following one year of post-doctoral research in the same lab working on a metagenomic study of soil microorganisms with biotechnological relevance, he moved to the ZMBH, as a post-doctoral research fellow. His current research interests lie primarily in the fields of microbial genetics and evolution. He combines tools and approaches of molecular genetics, genomics-bioinformatics, and cell biology to: i. study the mechanisms and impact of sexual and parasexual recombination on genome evolution, ii. characterize fungal genome stability and dynamics under varying environmental conditions, and iii. analyze the function of important fungal genes in cell communication and other important biological processes.